Zero tolerance for campus sex-chant ‘tradition’

Ugly campus ritual shows a complete disconnect with the lived reality of women.

Students attend a rally at Saint Mary's University to express their concerns over a chant that promoted rape culture during a recent school activity. (Sept. 12, 2013)

By:Calvin White Published on Sun Sep 15 2013

This past Christmas, I led a group of British Columbia high school students on a three-week experience in India designed to connect them to a deeper part of what we are as humans and to a deeper part of themselves as individuals. While there, some of us attended a protest demonstration about the then-recent vicious gang rape of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student.

In one area, a crowd had gathered to hear speakers. One of our students, 16-year-old Emilyn, decided to take a turn at the podium. She was nervous, but despite the fact that many in the crowd wouldn’t understand English, she wanted to add her voice. Her words were simple and ardent. Part of what she said was, “This is your home. It doesn’t matter whether you are man or woman. No one should be afraid to walk on the street in their own home. This is the right of all of us in our own homes.”

Traditions that have been going on for up to 20 years. This is the time to orient our young adults, the cream of our intellectual talent, to the halls of higher learning, and it’s been a norm to include this boastful and triumphant assertion of the right to destroy other human beings, human beings less powerful and still in childhood. In the case of the Sauder incident, it’s reported that the chanting students had been told not to do it in public but behind closed doors.

Think for a moment. If the chant had used an acronym to spell out the equivalent of “Burn those greedy Jews” or “Lynch those thieving n-----s,” all hell would have broken loose. Instead there have merely been comments calling it brazen, obnoxious, encouraging rape culture, and a case of not having control of what student leaders do in private. This is not an outrage commensurate with the degree of heinousness the chant represents.

The truth is that the chant shows a complete disconnect with the lived reality of women. A complete disconnect from the intense suffering that sexual assault causes. It is a boast of entitlement imbued with self-centredness and unquestioning smugness of physical power. And, at base, it is demonstrative of low-level intelligence.

The one positive is that now we have been exposed. This is us, and it is our society. Emilyn might well conclude that India is here. And make no mistake, just as in India, countless numbers of Canadian girls are sexually assaulted each year and do not report it due to social stigma, shame or the ordeal of going through the legal aftermath.

Will the publicity surrounding the chants change attitudes, change behaviour, change the threat that women face? Or, just as with racist jokes, just push it a bit further from sight? After all the persistent, nation-wide protests in India and political vows for legal reform to address the victimization of women in that country and the social complacency which fosters it, a 22-year-old photojournalist was gang-raped in Mumbai just three weeks ago.

Public schools do have the power to make a difference. Universities, too. Instead of the traditional focus on academic pursuits, assignments and grading, responsibility could be broadened to focus equally on growing aware and connected human beings. Human beings who see themselves in others. Instead of slogans, posters and declarations that “We are a harassment-free campus,” there could be compulsory human relations courses. In most universities, it’s mandatory to take a first-year English course. How much more lasting and beneficial might it be to have all students taking human relations courses?

If we really got it. If we really understood how serious it is that our future leaders, professionals, academics saw nothing wrong with chanting about assaulting unconsenting underage girls and our current administrations basically tsk-tsk it, simply responding with verbal chastisement, there would be a force now to effect change. If the prime minister got it the way the young 15-year-old does who slinks home after being raped at a school party, he would insist on change and initiate concrete steps to make it happen.

Calvin White is a B.C. essayist, former high school counsellor of 20 years, and author of The Secret Life of Teenagers (The Key Publishing Company, 2013). For more on this topic, see thestar.com/opinion for a commentary by nine sociologists.